If you're enrolled in my Query Writing class on April 17th, this is your chance to post your query letter...and possibly get a Turning Points class for free.
This has been immensely helpful. My query letter was too dry so I rewrote it showing how the book will make readers feel and began the query with an emotional punch. Thank you!
Has anyone gotten the zoom link for the query class? It takes place later on this evening and I haven't gotten any information about how to join. We were supposed to get a link two days ago, and I'm not seeing it. Thanks!
I’m so excited to share No, Chef with you, a complete, 80,000-word contemporary women’s fiction novel that explores the nebulous world of misconduct in restaurants through the eyes of Matty, a recent culinary school graduate who’s pursuing food writing. Part romance novel, part deeper exploration of harassment from the female perspective, I hope Alleged Encounters will appeal to fans of Jasmine Guillory, Julie James, and Elin Hilderbrand, and I thought of you for this work because of XXX.
One night, Matty is left seething when one of the country’s most famous chefs says something blatantly sexist to her during a visit to his restaurant, inspiring her to concoct a farfetched, but crazy-enough-to-work plan: She’ll work undercover at Chef’s restaurant while reporting on the sexism that still runs rampant and often unchecked behind kitchen doors. What she doesn’t plan on is falling for one of the other cooks.
Everything is in place for Matty — she scores an internship at Chef’s New York City restaurant and convinces one of the leading online food publications to work with her on the investigation — when she meets the restaurant’s second-in-command. Andrew is one of those rare white male restaurant cooks who’s respectful, humble, intelligent, sensitive — and seriously hot. Despite trying to avoid Andrew’s magnetic pull, she finds herself continually seeking him out at work. They start secretly dating, all while she’s lying to him about her true identity and working behind his back to unravel the complicated web of relationships at Arbiter — relationships that include the assistant general manager sleeping with Chef, an entitled and prone-to-rage sous chef who just so happens to be Chef’s nephew, and a talented female line cook who always finds herself finishing last.
Will Matty and Andrew end up together? Does Matty expose Chef, rightfully taking him down in the process? Or does everything explode in her face, leaving her the one burned? The answer is not so clear-cut nor easily satisfying, as is so often the case in real life when it comes to harassment and misconduct. Alleged Encounters presents itself as surface chick lit, but through a candy-like love story and light tone, it explores several deeper themes: the murky lines of misconduct and casual sexism, how fairy tales have warped many women’s idea of a happy ending, what it means for a woman to want and try to “have it all,” and that there’s never a perfect victim — or villain.
I am an editor for OpenTable with more than a decade of experience writing for publications such as Cosmopolitan, Eater, and Good Morning America, and I was thrilled to put that deep knowledge of writing and the restaurant world to use in No, Chef.
Thank you for your time and consideration — I hope to work with you!
Hi Stefanie! As I'd stipulated in the call for query letters, I stopped reading queries as of last Friday at noon EST. I do hope you can make it to the class though and thank you for sharing! Good luck out there in Query land.
My query is a bit longer than it should be. I'm trying to hone my logline to the essential. I haven't formally queried in over a year. I did hear back from agents with somewhat different versions of this query, during earlier phases of my novel, with interest and an almost offer (complicated story). Your feedback is appreciated.
Dear [Agent],
[Opening: personal to the agent: I enjoyed your talk at such and such an event.] Your interest in [related topics/strong female characters] prompts me to tell you about my literary project. THE SCYTHER (100,000 words) won First Place in Historical Fiction in the 2021 Pacific Northwest Writers Association Literary Contest.
February 1917, in southern Italy. Seventeen-year-old Nunzia and her mother tend to Nunzia’s older sister, who is dying of malaria. Nunzia’s father, a peasant overseer for one of the region’s last great estates, is among thousands of conscripted soldiers fighting in the trenches at the northern front. When he is reported missing, suspected of desertion, a capital offense with repercussions for the family, Nunzia has only his scythe and her own resourcefulness to keep herself and her mother alive.
Her quest for survival leads her from the scourged grainfields to the spirited woods, abandoned hunting grounds, and alleyways of her village. Along the way, her life becomes intertwined with a priest, an itinerant farmer, a village healer, a few veterans who may know something about her father’s fate, and the ruined aristocracy from whom she secretly hoards small change. The northern armistice delivers anything but peace. Nunzia’s uncle returns from America with real money and aspirations to replace the landed gentry—but is he truly her uncle? As his experimental methods alter the landscape, worsening famine, his erratic temper sparks divisions in the community and at home. Nunzia turns to an outsider, Bavarian anthropologist Ugo, and risks the pain of first love, only to end up alone again. When a peasant uprising turns the fields into a battleground, Nunzia’s family ruptures and her village is at risk. Nunzia must choose between her own desires and the good of her people.
Nunzia’s story is inspired by my years as a resident-scholar in rural Italy and by the legacy of a steely female forebear. In the vein of Salvatore Scibona and Mary Doria Russell, THE SCYTHER explores the alternately dim and lucid perspectives of minor players in history. My historical fiction earned an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest. My published translations include Vinciane Despret’s critical essay “Why ‘I had Not Read Derrida,’” in the collection of essays French Thinking About Animals, Michigan State University Press (2015), and selected poems by Giovanni Pascoli, in The Italian Poetry Review, vol. VI. Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2011, and in Ezra: Online Journal of Translation (2007). I hold an MFA in Creative Writing, from the University of New Orleans, and a PhD in Comparative Literature (Italian and French) from the University of Washington, where I taught language, literature, and writing. Most recently, I mentor emerging authors and writing professionals as a developmental editor. [Aspirational statement: newsletter-Substack-publications].
Given your interest in [PERSONALIZATION], I am pleased to submit to you my debut upmarket novel (90k wc). IMPOSTER SYNDROME is the story of a one-time bestselling author who resorts to stealing from her children to revive her lackluster career.
Since pregnancy took her by surprise on the eve of her debut novel’s release fifteen years ago, motherhood sits firmly in Quinn Archer’s driver’s seat. Married to workaholic lawyer Jack, her writing career takes a back seat to her daily struggle to keep up appearances in her tony L.A. suburb, where she spends more hours of the day chauffeuring her neurodivergent son and aloof teenage daughter than reaching her daily word count. At forty, Quinn is ready to stop hiding behind motherhood and land a new book deal. She’s willing to do whatever it takes to get her career back on track, even joining a reality show to boost her public profile. She just has to reinvent herself unrecognizable first—including taking the latest diet drug to drop the baby weight she’s held onto for over a decade.
When she falls flat rather than rising as a star, no one is happier than Quinn when her workaholic husband whisks their family to Singapore for his promotion—and a fresh start. But agent rejections, dieting woes, and the reality that she is raising her two struggling children alone weigh heavily on Quinn as she adjusts to life in the Lion City. Desperate and sleep-deprived, Quinn makes a series of questionable choices—not least of which is fueling herself with her son’s ADHD medication and lifting passages from her daughter’s worrisome journal to breathe new life into her manuscript. The kids may not be alright, and her husband noticeably absent, but at long last, Quinn secures her dream publishing deal. In her search for validation and fulfillment, has Quinn lost sight of those she loves most—her children, her husband, and, perhaps most surprisingly, herself?
IMPOSTER SYNDROME explores societal expectations of motherhood, marriage, and work. Think Kristen Arnett’s WITH TEETH and Meg Wolitzer’s THE TEN-YEAR NAP meets the voice of Rose Byrne in a contemporary PHYSICAL.
I’m an American expat based in Singapore and Hong Kong for the past seventeen years, where I have been raising my two children, including an eleven-year-old with ADHD and ASD. I’ve taken several writing courses, including GrubStreet’s competitive year-long Novel Generator Program, and am part of an active writing critique group. My short fiction has appeared in Off Topic Publishing (Honorable Mention), Flash Fiction Magazine, and Creation Magazine. I have a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Indiana University and a master’s from Columbia University.
This fraught internal landscape of the mother/artist is vast and boggy! So rich! I’m reading Claire Dederer’s MONSTERS, essays about sexism in all aspects of art, the challenge of making art as a woman and even more so as a mother, and what making art might require from those who are programmed to be selfless. There is a chapter called “Abandoning Mothers” about Doris Lessing and Joni Mitchell and this theme is woven through the entire book — can we be good mothers if we want to make great art?
Oh this sounds so dishy. I like it! You should connect with Amy Shearn who is here on Substack-- her latest novel is also about a former bestselling author trying to make a comeback. Maybe you could pitch a review or a profile of Amy to help build up your own content around the topics in your book!
A bit long but this is my last chance to post before noon. Looking forward to the class!
Dear [Agent],
I’m seeking representation for The Maidenhood Mulligan, a first-person bildungsroman set in the 1970s about Rembry McDowell, a naïve but determined fourteen-year-old who believes her scholarship to a New England boarding school will be her ticket to a normal life, including, she hopes, a sweet teen romance with a swoony hunk. Her waitress-mother Pru, a proud Puritan descendent by day and an artistic Bohemian by night, has treated Rembry like a ticking hormone-bomb ever since she started needing a bra. Her little sister Mayfie is sweet but clings to Rembry like a seventy-five-pound barnacle; her best friend Stacey is distracted by the town hockey god. Rembry tried twice before to escape their gossipy Buzzards Bay town by asking her father to move both daughters to New York, but there was never enough room in Arthur’s one-bedroom or his life as a math teacher-coach and bachelor-on-a-budget to raise two growing girls.
Rembry’s freshman year at The Pimsey River School begins auspiciously enough: the campus is beautiful, her roommate Kes is miraculously humble for a rich kid, and the freedom is intoxicating. But by midterms Rembry is more baffled than ever by arcane WASP culture and in danger of sinking academically. To save her scholarship and find her place at Pimsey Rembry embarks on an odyssey of rigorous study: of sentence diagramming, fair isle sweater decoding, fetal pig dissecting, athletic sandbagging (never admit you’re any good), thrift-shop dressing, Joni Mitchell-memorizing, and the art of hovering in the vicinity of the male prep without startling him back into his popped collar.
By mid-sophomore year Rembry is sister-close to Kes and feels like she actually belongs at Pimsey. Thanks to her innate rowing talent and a hard-won GPA, Rembry she might have a shot at the Ivy League. Her French teacher helps her apply for a junior term abroad scholarship and her new dorm head recruits her into a special culture seminar with an odd and gifted freshman named Sophie Sablon. Rembry is riding so high she doesn’t notice she is drifting away from quiet, science-loving Kes. When Rembry returns from France she is blind-sided by a sexual assault that turns her disillusioned and angry. Faltering but not destroyed, she decides to exact revenge via a swashbuckling “mulligan” period that succeeds in restoring her sense of self and sexual agency, but also lands her in a School Judicial where she is forced to choose between a snitch-bought pardon and loyalty to the swoony hunk who was ten times sweeter than she hoped.
The arc of the novel emphasizes coming-of-age, not trauma, and foregrounds Rembry’s transformation from meek prep supplicant to carpe-hunkum scholar-virago. For comps The Maidenhood Mulligan could be categorized as a mixture of the questing humor in Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep and the fraught art-mentorship issues in Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise.
I wrote the 90,000-word manuscript in Lynn Steger Strong’s 2023-2024 Novel Generator workshop. Jayne Anne Phillips awarded my story “Motu Tapu” the 2015 Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction. My stories have also appeared in Mademoiselle (RIP) and The Crab Orchard Review.
Thank you for your time and consideration. I would be delighted to send you sample pages.
My advice to you is to be more sparing with the humor- especially in the first paragraph we are being given so many images and metaphors that it's hard to discern what the book is actually about! That trend continues throughout the letter-- go for clarity, not cleverness-- and the letter will be stronger. It needs to be shortened, generally, as well. Good luck!
Thank you, Courtney! I was aiming for voice but I can see the overload. Will focus on clarity and turning hyperdetailism into summary on my next attempt....
This is my first time querying, so I'm excited to learn how to make my query letter as compelling as possible. Also, I’m happy to share the actual statistics referenced in the last paragraph during the workshop if my letter is chosen to discuss. Thanks for this opportunity to share my letter!
Dear [Agent],
I’m seeking representation for my debut mystery novel, THE PRICE SHE PAID (87,000 words). The book combines the rich character development of the Inspector Lynley mysteries by Elizabeth George with the fast pacing of the Temperance Brennan thrillers by Kathy Reichs.
Estranged friends Dez and Jessie reconcile their past as they obstruct the investigation into Jessie’s mother’s murder to untangle the secrets hiding her killer.
Riding for the first time since her accident, jockey Desirae Lavalle is hoping to regain her peace of mind. Instead, she finds a severed body part belonging to the murdered mother of her estranged best friend Jessie Harrington. Detectives Fitzgerald Brady and Calla Vos quickly place the victim’s narcissistic husband at the center of their investigation. But Jessie, distrustful the police can understand her dysfunctional family, reunites with Dez to untangle the secrets hidden in her mother’s paintings while the traumatized jockey battles her relapsing OCD. As the case becomes national news and the detectives reckon with the sacrifices their jobs require, all efforts converge on a book club book that might hold the keys to the killer’s identity. But no one is prepared for the shocking truth and what it means about the psychological forces driving us all. Told from multiple points of view in the thirty-six hours after the body is discovered, THE PRICE SHE PAID is a fast-paced story about the true price of secrets we keep from ourselves.
I’m a therapist with both personal and professional expertise in the intersection of trauma and OCD, the co-author of an OCD self-help book (published by New Harbinger; X+ copies sold), and author of Is Fred in the Refrigerator? Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life (my self-published memoir; X+ copies sold). My outreach includes blogging for Psychology Today (posts viewed X times/year) and my website (X visitors/year), and I’ve been interviewed for coverage about OCD in The Washington Post, VICE, Psych Central, and others. When not writing or seeing clients, I’m pretending I’m on a jockey on my Arabian horse, Dove.
A 32-year relationship is tested by a steamy same-sex attraction, an open marriage, and an involuntary mental health stay in Hurricane Lessons, my 58,000-word memoir of a Midwestern mid-life reckoning and realignment, structured in three parts: The Calm Before the Storm, The Eyewall, and The Aftermath. Because the primary theme of Hurricane Lessons is the vitriolic breakdown of a 25-year marriage after a late-in-life coming out, my memoir will appeal to readers of Suzette Mullen’s The Only Way Out is Through, Molly Roden Winter’s More, Gina Frangello’s Blow Your House Down, and Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful.
For the first four decades of my life, I wasn’t brave enough to fully and unapologetically love a woman in a world that had successfully taught me how to be a straight, married, suburban mom of four. Everything shifted when Colleene, my Pilates instructor, pressed her elegant hands into my spine and set my life on fire. Spontaneous combustion. In that instant, I knew I had to choose between the life I had painstakingly built and the life I was meant to live. My then-husband, Chris, and I tried to salvage our marriage by opening it up to other lovers, but when he screamed at me that I was a reverse-Oedipal lesbian cunt—words he had carefully crafted and rehearsed—and later had me committed against my will, I knew I had to liberate myself from the what was so I could finally live who I was.
As the self-appointed President of the St. Michael’s second grade Ranger Rick Club, I always knew I was destined for something big. I wrote my first book—The Story of My Life. A True Story.— at age eight on orange construction paper that was hole-punched and tied with ribbon, which my mother lovingly preserved. The back jacket cover promised the book “Could change your life, just as it changed Katrina’s because she put it down on paper and let her feelings show.” It was a few decades later, however, before my award-winning novel, Parting Gifts was published (She Writes Press, April 2016.) My personal essays have been read by over 1M readers on Huffington Post (I Was a Happily Married Mother of Four. Then I Met a Woman at Pilates.), YourTango.com, and the Manifest-Station and featured in numerous anthologies, including Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis: Women Writers Respond to the Call. In 2016, I was recognized as one of six distinguished authors at the Indianapolis Book & Author luncheon—joining the ranks of past recipients, Elizabeth Berg, Maria de los Santos, Anna Quindlen, Anita Shreve, and Taylor Jenkins Reid—and I was named a BlogHer 2015: Experts Among Us “Voice of the Year.” I am still eagerly awaiting someone to option the movie rights to The Story of My Life. A True Story. (1979).
The first [xx] pages of my memoir are included, and I am happy to provide a complete manuscript at your request. Many thanks for your time and consideration.
This sounds so so good but there is far too much going on. You're going to need to streamline and focus on the most essential thing this book is about and communicate that in your letter. One thing that is helpful is if you stand up and read the query letter out loud (or better yet out loud in front of people)-- your gut (or your friends) can help you understand where the letter needs reigning in.
I see that you are on the lookout for narratives that examine complicated relationships with empathy and humor and I’m hoping that you might be intrigued by my 89,000-word upmarket novel, RESCUING ANNIE.
After ending a thirty-year marriage to a man with a chronic case of failure to launch, Annie, at fifty-five, is on the verge of getting everything she’s ever wanted: a deal to publish her debut novel and life lived on her own terms. But trouble has a way of following Annie around. With her widowed mother in the grip of dementia, and siblings who can’t or won’t help, Annie must come to the rescue. With the crisis de jour, Annie has no sooner settled her mother in her Florida condo when her twentysomething daughter calls from Paris, distraught over the sudden death of her best friend. Annie sees no choice but to fly to Paris.
Trying to juggle it all—her increasingly disoriented mother, a bereaved daughter she can’t seem to comfort and a publishing dream vanishing with every missed deadline—Paris becomes an irresistible diversion, especially when a romance begins to bloom with a handsome French artist who reminds her that part of herself is still very much alive. When her daughter goes into hiding, and her alarmed ex takes the next flight out to Paris with an ulterior motive—he wants Annie back—complications reach a crescendo. There simply isn’t enough of her to go around. As her mother slips further away, Annie has to confront what it really means to choose herself after a lifetime as the good daughter, the good wife and the good mother—learning that freedom was hers for the taking all along.
RESCUING ANNIE will appeal to fans of the complex relationship dynamics and mid-life reinvention in MONOGAMY (Sue Miller) and LEAVING (Roxane Robinson) and the nuanced portrayal of dementia in SIGNAL FIRES (Dani Shapiro).
I write a twice-weekly Substack newsletter, Living in 3D: Divorce, Dementia and Destiny, for an engaged readership. A freelance writer, editor and journalist for Reuters and a ghostwriter of business books for Palgrave MacMillan, I lived in Sweden and Malta for two decades. My middle-grade novel, MORMOR’S PIANO, won first prize in the unpublished middle-grade fiction category from the Florida Writer’s Association (FWA) in 2016. My short stories have been published in FWA’s annual anthologies. My full bio can be found at amybrownauthor.com.
Thank you. I am sure you will love these books. I feel a bit daunted choosing these terrific, seasoned and accomplished authors I so admire as comps--but that is the subject matter and sensibility I aim for in my own writing.
How do you ask for permission from the dead? I struggled with this question in my mid-20s, following my mother’s death from cancer.
My quest for approval started when I was a senior in college in the late 90s. Then, I told my mother about a relationship I’d had with a woman. I wasn’t sure I was a lesbian. Bi, maybe? I knew this wasn’t in her Plan for me (Capital “P.” A two-time cancer survivor, psych ward administrator and inveterate meddler, my mother had Plans). In her mind, I would meet a nice Jewish (male) doctor and snag a wedding announcement in The New York Times, where same-sex couples need not apply at the time. Still, I wanted her to say I was okay just the way I was.
She didn’t. “Your life will be so much harder if you end up with a woman,” she said then. Those turned out to be her only words on the subject. Cancer took her a few years later, just as I was finishing law school in New York City and trying to ignore my persistent attraction to women. In my memoir, COMING IN (90,000 words), I reimagine the coming out story with a search for the approval my mother never gave me.
Despite my mother’s warning, after her death, I found that life was hard no matter whom I dated. I left a sexually unfulfilling relationship with a sweet guy for a married couple, who encouraged me to chase my desire but ultimately couldn’t give me what I wanted. I discovered another kind of love with the sweet guy—then an ex—after he was diagnosed with a terminal illness. A butch woman finally showed me that I could be my full self in a monogamous relationship, before breaking up with me. With the help and heartache of these relationships, as well as encounters with a medium and an actor from my favorite musical as a teen, Les Misérables, I eventually learned the lesson my mother never taught me: Only I could give myself permission to be me.
An honest examination of grief, desire, sex, identity and intimacy, Coming In is a journey about finding oneself, apart from parental and societal expectations. My memoir chronicles the long journey to coming out and its effect on our relationships with our mothers in a similar way to Saeed Jones’s HOW WE FIGHT FOR OUR LIVES. It shares Nicole Chung’s clear prose and focus on parental loss in A LIVING REMEDY. It will also appeal to readers of Laurel Braitman’s WHAT LOOKS LIKE BRAVERY, as it explores the effects of growing up in a family with illness while also sharing Braitman’s propulsive pacing.
I’m a writer on the communications team at one of the largest law firms in the country. Prior to that, I practiced corporate law for many years. In addition to a JD, I hold an MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University, where I won an award for best screenplay. In the years since my MFA, I’ve studied creative nonfiction with Megan Stielstra and Meghan Daum, as well as Sari Botton. My personal essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Huffington Post, Longreads and It’s Not Us, and have been featured twice in Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web.
I agree with Sarah-- this sounds like an astonishing book, but you'll need to really shorten things up for the letter otherwise agents will worry that your manuscript is also overlong. Best of luck out there in query land!
What a journey you've been through. I'm so sorry you lost your mum. Your memoir sounds like an enthralling and harrowing read.
I had a writing tutor who had a friend at Penguin South Africa and she told me they appreciate brevity above all things (regarding queries from authors). Dear Lord, isn't it a struggle to condense a fictional character arc, let alone your own life, into 1-3 crisp paragraphs?! Despite the hacking and sawing job you've done, I wonder if you could be even more brutal in trimming this down. Consider challenging yourself to punch the recipient in the gut with your one biggest struggle, and nothing else. It forever surprises me how little detail and context readers really need to understand that teeny, tiny, brilliant spark of what one is really trying to say. A quest for approval as a young lesbian woman in the 90s? How can this woman ever feel accepted by her parents now her mother's passed away? Kapow.
In any case, GOOD LUCK! I'm sure you are not the only one who has been through something like this, and it will certainly help others when it gets out there.
Love this feedback, Sarah! I really appreciate it and agree. It's so hard to get outside your own story and boil it down to its essence but I will keep working on it!
I hope you will consider representing my debut novel RACHEL AND THE ANCESTORS (72,000 words). Set in London and Cornwall in 1932–1933, it is the story of Rachel Buxton, an ambitious 24-year-old writer who is unwittingly advancing fascist interests even as she works to help German Jewish cousins get out of Berlin. It’s a novel that will appeal to fans of Kate Atkinson’s Transcription and Francine Prose’s The Vixen. I’m writing to you because of your interest in representing historical fiction with unfamiliar stories--while there are many novels about courageous young women set in World War II, there are few about the rise of fascism in the early 1930s, a time that I'm afraid bears an eerie similarity to our own era.
Rachel complies with the landowner’s insistence that she emphasize the connections between his estate and the legend of Tristan and Isolde, though she doubts that Tristan ever existed. Yet the deeper Rachel digs into the family’s history, the more she realizes how very flawed and ordinary they are and the more difficult she finds it to claim any sort of noble heritage for them. And the clock is ticking on cousin Ilka’s efforts to get her family out of Berlin, a project Rachel thinks is hopeless.
But after Rachel meets Alfred Smethwick (inspired by Oswald Mosley) the powerful and charismatic MP and leader of Britain's growing fascist party and learns that he plans to use her work to flatter Adolf Hitler, a fan of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, she wants to abandon the project. But Ilka argues that Smethwick is likely the only man in Britain who can get her family out of Berlin. Rachel has no choice but to get closer to Smethwick.
I am a Boston-area writer and theater reviewer. I have visited Cornwall a number of times to research my novel, and I write regularly for Current Biography, Literary Ladies Guide, and Stage and Cinema, and my work has appeared inBlack Warrior Review, Ploughshares, and Christian Science Monitor. My MFA is from UMass Amherst, and I have received residencies from Yaddo and the Millay Colony.
I’ve pasted in a synopsis and bio and attached the first 50 pages.
I couldn’t stop retracing my steps. I notoriously ruined leisure activities by mentally cataloging my elementary school teachers, tracking Disneyland rides, chronicling every guy I’d ever slept with. It was like a neurotic game of connect-the-dots that never ended. Since childhood, I had been leaving myself breadcrumb trails, and by the time I hit midlife, it was so natural to me that I almost didn’t question it. Until I did.
Breadcrumbs Across Suburbia: How I Retraced My Steps And Found My Way Home is an 87,000-word memoir that encapsulates a nostalgia pilgrimage across four midwestern states, two years of IFS therapy, a midlife ADHD diagnosis, and the end of a 14-year marriage. It is Group meets Untamed meets This American Ex-Wife.
In 2014, as a self-proclaimed nostalgia junkie, I had the hare-brained idea to take my two- and seven-year-old daughters, sans husband, on a 25-hour road trip to say goodbye to my childhood home. Well, one of them. As I lay on a massage table shortly before the trip, sabotaging yet another perfectly relaxing body care treatment, I tallied 18 homes over 45 years. And after I bid farewell to my parents’ house, I couldn’t shake the idea that I wanted to go back and visit every single one of them, from Iowa to Milwaukee to Denver.
I felt certain that returning to every old house would uncover some great mystery that explained why exactly I was so, well, weird, despite my boring Midwest Lutheran Scandinavian upbringing. Once I had the idea, I promptly did nothing about it for nearly a decade, until it became the Ghost of Christmas Past tearing open my bed canopy and I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
In 2022, after a year of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy and identifying the different “parts” that made up my system—The Good Girl, The Backyard Bitch, The Fire Goddess, The Lazy Daydreamer, Little Liar, The Inner Critic, the Confident Queen, to name a few—I realized I had been looking for answers in the wrong places. I needed to follow my inner trailheads, not my outer ones. When I finally took my nostalgia pilgrimage to visit all 17 former homes, I did so through the lens of IFS, and at long last discovered what I was looking for. As I followed my trails of breadcrumbs, I wrote myself out of one life and into another. I left a career I had outgrown. I filed for divorce. I got the ADHD diagnosis that shed light on four decades of step-retracing and discomfort in my own skin.
IFS therapy is having a moment in pop culture. Celebrities like Dr. Becky of Good Inside, Glennon Doyle, host of We Can Do Hard Things and author of Untamed, and even Alanis Morrisette, have integrated “parts work” into the cultural lexicon. As Gen X women hit midlife, the therapy generation continues to make this kind of work more mainstream. My book adds to the discourse by exploring the value of IFS in untangling previously unexplored issues in midlife.
I am co-host of the Mother Plus Podcast, a show for moms with ADHD, Executive Producer of Listen To Your Mother, co-editor of Midstory Magazine on Substack, and a freelance writer and stand up comic. My work has been published in O Magazine, The Washington Post, Brain, Child Magazine, Cosmopolitan.com, The Huffington Post, The Belladonna Comedy, Mutha Magazine, The Chicken Soup for the Soul series, and other places.
Thank you so much for sharing! There are a lot of moving pieces in this query which could lead agents to not respond because they could think that your book is overly complicated or "not about one thing." You'll want to streamline to come up with what sounds like a "sticky" premise. Best of luck with this!
Thanks so much for this opportunity! I'm excited for the class!
Dear Agent,
(Personalize here)
My son couldn’t see me from the other side of the mattress I was attempting to push up the stairs, but he knew his mother was struggling. I hated that. My lack of strength wasn’t supposed to force him, at nine years old, to be strong. He shouldn’t have to listen to his mother crying behind a mattress, especially on the day he and his little sister moved into an apartment half the size of the only house they remembered living in, as they anticipated starting a different school and everything else my decisions caused to change in their lives. And as I hid behind that mattress, the fear set in that maybe the aftermath of the divorce I chose in order to find happiness would be worse on my children than if I stayed in my unhappy marriage.
CAMOUFLAGE: A Memoir of Divorce, Hope and Self-Discovery (69,000 words) is the story of how I emerged from the shadow of my husband’s military career and found my way back to myself as a single mother approaching middle age. And as I set out on a quest to figure out who I was as a woman without this man, I discovered my life as a military spouse actually prepared me for not being one.
CAMOUFLAGE is a story of letting go and moving on, self-discovery and second chances. My story speaks to readers facing divorce, women searching for lost identities, single parents and military spouses. It would sit on a bookshelf with Lyz Lenz’s THIS AMERICAN EX-WIFE, Leslie Jamison’s SPLINTERS and Kelly McMasters’ THE LEAVING SEASON.
Divorce is having a cultural moment in which women are leaving their marriages to pursue happiness. In fact, more than two-thirds of all divorces are filed by women. As Lyz Lenz writes in her best-selling memoir, divorce “requires learning to reimagine happiness beyond what everyone told you it should look like.” As this trend continues, my book fits perfectly into the conversation, while also sharing a unique sneak peek into the life of a Navy officer’s wife.
Similar to my recent reported essay for The TODAY Show, I’ll weave reporting into my existing manuscript. I plan to reach out to family and marriage experts and psychologists to interlace my own story within the cultural moment.
I’ve been a writer and content editor at Military.com for eleven years. My essays about military life and divorce appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, HuffPost, The TODAY Show and YourTango, among others, and I have other work in Business Insider, Grown and Flown, Healthline, The Girlfriend from AARP and more. My HuffPost reel talking about my divorce essay currently has 90K views on Instagram and 13.3K views on TikTok.
I have both a proposal and a full manuscript available upon request. Thank you for your consideration.
I see we write on the same topic, Heather, although yours in memoir and mine in fiction. I would love to read your book. I've read all the comps you mentioned. Good luck!
Thanks so much, Amy! I've actually sometimes thought about writing my memoir as fiction, but I'm sticking with this memoir and then hopefully writing a novel with content I couldn't include in the memoir. Good luck to you too!
This sounds great and the "MilWife" is well deserving of her place in the cultural spotlight! Do you know the short story collection by Siobhan Fallon? It's a fictional version of the women living in their husband's military careers....
Thank you so much! The mil spouse life is so unique with many untold stories, especially those of divorce. And yes, I've known Siobhan from afar (we're Facebook friends) for probably a decade now! In fact, her book was one of the first mil spouse books I ever read. So good.
We can have a little Siobhan fan club right here! We lived in Abu Dhabi at the same time & got to know each other - she's in Cyprus now, still making MilWifeLife work. Your project sounds so well-timed; I'm sure it's going to be snapped up!
I love that...a Siobhan fan club! How cool you had a chance to get to know her. And thank you so much for saying that about my memoir. Fingers crossed!
Submitted is 77,000-word novel titled ”The Upfall.” It is about a young man’s journey from child abuse to alcoholism and murder and back. He struggles as a teenager and young adult with sobriety while trying to make amends for the death he caused. It is a story of struggle and redemption.
My bio follows:
Geraghty is a writer and a maritime lawyer. He has published in The Pittsburgh Journal of Law and Commerce a scholarly article regarding a defense to a seafarer’s personal injury suit, along with several legal cases.
He has been writing all his life and majored in English at Boston College. Afterwards, he was also Honorable Mention in the Writer’s Digest annual Short Story Contest.
Some of his favorite authors include Jo Nesbo, Henning Mankel, Donna Tartt, John Kennedy Toole and Douglas Adams.
When he is not writing he enjoys skiing, running, cycling and other activities with his children.
This has been immensely helpful. My query letter was too dry so I rewrote it showing how the book will make readers feel and began the query with an emotional punch. Thank you!
Oh! I'm so glad to hear that. Good luck out there!
Has anyone gotten the zoom link for the query class? It takes place later on this evening and I haven't gotten any information about how to join. We were supposed to get a link two days ago, and I'm not seeing it. Thanks!
Hurry up and get this published so I can read this!
Hi AGENT,
I’m so excited to share No, Chef with you, a complete, 80,000-word contemporary women’s fiction novel that explores the nebulous world of misconduct in restaurants through the eyes of Matty, a recent culinary school graduate who’s pursuing food writing. Part romance novel, part deeper exploration of harassment from the female perspective, I hope Alleged Encounters will appeal to fans of Jasmine Guillory, Julie James, and Elin Hilderbrand, and I thought of you for this work because of XXX.
One night, Matty is left seething when one of the country’s most famous chefs says something blatantly sexist to her during a visit to his restaurant, inspiring her to concoct a farfetched, but crazy-enough-to-work plan: She’ll work undercover at Chef’s restaurant while reporting on the sexism that still runs rampant and often unchecked behind kitchen doors. What she doesn’t plan on is falling for one of the other cooks.
Everything is in place for Matty — she scores an internship at Chef’s New York City restaurant and convinces one of the leading online food publications to work with her on the investigation — when she meets the restaurant’s second-in-command. Andrew is one of those rare white male restaurant cooks who’s respectful, humble, intelligent, sensitive — and seriously hot. Despite trying to avoid Andrew’s magnetic pull, she finds herself continually seeking him out at work. They start secretly dating, all while she’s lying to him about her true identity and working behind his back to unravel the complicated web of relationships at Arbiter — relationships that include the assistant general manager sleeping with Chef, an entitled and prone-to-rage sous chef who just so happens to be Chef’s nephew, and a talented female line cook who always finds herself finishing last.
Will Matty and Andrew end up together? Does Matty expose Chef, rightfully taking him down in the process? Or does everything explode in her face, leaving her the one burned? The answer is not so clear-cut nor easily satisfying, as is so often the case in real life when it comes to harassment and misconduct. Alleged Encounters presents itself as surface chick lit, but through a candy-like love story and light tone, it explores several deeper themes: the murky lines of misconduct and casual sexism, how fairy tales have warped many women’s idea of a happy ending, what it means for a woman to want and try to “have it all,” and that there’s never a perfect victim — or villain.
I am an editor for OpenTable with more than a decade of experience writing for publications such as Cosmopolitan, Eater, and Good Morning America, and I was thrilled to put that deep knowledge of writing and the restaurant world to use in No, Chef.
Thank you for your time and consideration — I hope to work with you!
Best,
Stefanie
Hi Stefanie! As I'd stipulated in the call for query letters, I stopped reading queries as of last Friday at noon EST. I do hope you can make it to the class though and thank you for sharing! Good luck out there in Query land.
My query is a bit longer than it should be. I'm trying to hone my logline to the essential. I haven't formally queried in over a year. I did hear back from agents with somewhat different versions of this query, during earlier phases of my novel, with interest and an almost offer (complicated story). Your feedback is appreciated.
Dear [Agent],
[Opening: personal to the agent: I enjoyed your talk at such and such an event.] Your interest in [related topics/strong female characters] prompts me to tell you about my literary project. THE SCYTHER (100,000 words) won First Place in Historical Fiction in the 2021 Pacific Northwest Writers Association Literary Contest.
February 1917, in southern Italy. Seventeen-year-old Nunzia and her mother tend to Nunzia’s older sister, who is dying of malaria. Nunzia’s father, a peasant overseer for one of the region’s last great estates, is among thousands of conscripted soldiers fighting in the trenches at the northern front. When he is reported missing, suspected of desertion, a capital offense with repercussions for the family, Nunzia has only his scythe and her own resourcefulness to keep herself and her mother alive.
Her quest for survival leads her from the scourged grainfields to the spirited woods, abandoned hunting grounds, and alleyways of her village. Along the way, her life becomes intertwined with a priest, an itinerant farmer, a village healer, a few veterans who may know something about her father’s fate, and the ruined aristocracy from whom she secretly hoards small change. The northern armistice delivers anything but peace. Nunzia’s uncle returns from America with real money and aspirations to replace the landed gentry—but is he truly her uncle? As his experimental methods alter the landscape, worsening famine, his erratic temper sparks divisions in the community and at home. Nunzia turns to an outsider, Bavarian anthropologist Ugo, and risks the pain of first love, only to end up alone again. When a peasant uprising turns the fields into a battleground, Nunzia’s family ruptures and her village is at risk. Nunzia must choose between her own desires and the good of her people.
Nunzia’s story is inspired by my years as a resident-scholar in rural Italy and by the legacy of a steely female forebear. In the vein of Salvatore Scibona and Mary Doria Russell, THE SCYTHER explores the alternately dim and lucid perspectives of minor players in history. My historical fiction earned an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest. My published translations include Vinciane Despret’s critical essay “Why ‘I had Not Read Derrida,’” in the collection of essays French Thinking About Animals, Michigan State University Press (2015), and selected poems by Giovanni Pascoli, in The Italian Poetry Review, vol. VI. Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2011, and in Ezra: Online Journal of Translation (2007). I hold an MFA in Creative Writing, from the University of New Orleans, and a PhD in Comparative Literature (Italian and French) from the University of Washington, where I taught language, literature, and writing. Most recently, I mentor emerging authors and writing professionals as a developmental editor. [Aspirational statement: newsletter-Substack-publications].
Thank you for your time and attention.
This make me smile. I truly appreciate it and know you get it. Thank you.
Dear [AGENT],
Given your interest in [PERSONALIZATION], I am pleased to submit to you my debut upmarket novel (90k wc). IMPOSTER SYNDROME is the story of a one-time bestselling author who resorts to stealing from her children to revive her lackluster career.
Since pregnancy took her by surprise on the eve of her debut novel’s release fifteen years ago, motherhood sits firmly in Quinn Archer’s driver’s seat. Married to workaholic lawyer Jack, her writing career takes a back seat to her daily struggle to keep up appearances in her tony L.A. suburb, where she spends more hours of the day chauffeuring her neurodivergent son and aloof teenage daughter than reaching her daily word count. At forty, Quinn is ready to stop hiding behind motherhood and land a new book deal. She’s willing to do whatever it takes to get her career back on track, even joining a reality show to boost her public profile. She just has to reinvent herself unrecognizable first—including taking the latest diet drug to drop the baby weight she’s held onto for over a decade.
When she falls flat rather than rising as a star, no one is happier than Quinn when her workaholic husband whisks their family to Singapore for his promotion—and a fresh start. But agent rejections, dieting woes, and the reality that she is raising her two struggling children alone weigh heavily on Quinn as she adjusts to life in the Lion City. Desperate and sleep-deprived, Quinn makes a series of questionable choices—not least of which is fueling herself with her son’s ADHD medication and lifting passages from her daughter’s worrisome journal to breathe new life into her manuscript. The kids may not be alright, and her husband noticeably absent, but at long last, Quinn secures her dream publishing deal. In her search for validation and fulfillment, has Quinn lost sight of those she loves most—her children, her husband, and, perhaps most surprisingly, herself?
IMPOSTER SYNDROME explores societal expectations of motherhood, marriage, and work. Think Kristen Arnett’s WITH TEETH and Meg Wolitzer’s THE TEN-YEAR NAP meets the voice of Rose Byrne in a contemporary PHYSICAL.
I’m an American expat based in Singapore and Hong Kong for the past seventeen years, where I have been raising my two children, including an eleven-year-old with ADHD and ASD. I’ve taken several writing courses, including GrubStreet’s competitive year-long Novel Generator Program, and am part of an active writing critique group. My short fiction has appeared in Off Topic Publishing (Honorable Mention), Flash Fiction Magazine, and Creation Magazine. I have a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Indiana University and a master’s from Columbia University.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Best,
Shaun
This fraught internal landscape of the mother/artist is vast and boggy! So rich! I’m reading Claire Dederer’s MONSTERS, essays about sexism in all aspects of art, the challenge of making art as a woman and even more so as a mother, and what making art might require from those who are programmed to be selfless. There is a chapter called “Abandoning Mothers” about Doris Lessing and Joni Mitchell and this theme is woven through the entire book — can we be good mothers if we want to make great art?
The million dollar question ;)
Oh this sounds so dishy. I like it! You should connect with Amy Shearn who is here on Substack-- her latest novel is also about a former bestselling author trying to make a comeback. Maybe you could pitch a review or a profile of Amy to help build up your own content around the topics in your book!
Oh that's great. Thank you!
A bit long but this is my last chance to post before noon. Looking forward to the class!
Dear [Agent],
I’m seeking representation for The Maidenhood Mulligan, a first-person bildungsroman set in the 1970s about Rembry McDowell, a naïve but determined fourteen-year-old who believes her scholarship to a New England boarding school will be her ticket to a normal life, including, she hopes, a sweet teen romance with a swoony hunk. Her waitress-mother Pru, a proud Puritan descendent by day and an artistic Bohemian by night, has treated Rembry like a ticking hormone-bomb ever since she started needing a bra. Her little sister Mayfie is sweet but clings to Rembry like a seventy-five-pound barnacle; her best friend Stacey is distracted by the town hockey god. Rembry tried twice before to escape their gossipy Buzzards Bay town by asking her father to move both daughters to New York, but there was never enough room in Arthur’s one-bedroom or his life as a math teacher-coach and bachelor-on-a-budget to raise two growing girls.
Rembry’s freshman year at The Pimsey River School begins auspiciously enough: the campus is beautiful, her roommate Kes is miraculously humble for a rich kid, and the freedom is intoxicating. But by midterms Rembry is more baffled than ever by arcane WASP culture and in danger of sinking academically. To save her scholarship and find her place at Pimsey Rembry embarks on an odyssey of rigorous study: of sentence diagramming, fair isle sweater decoding, fetal pig dissecting, athletic sandbagging (never admit you’re any good), thrift-shop dressing, Joni Mitchell-memorizing, and the art of hovering in the vicinity of the male prep without startling him back into his popped collar.
By mid-sophomore year Rembry is sister-close to Kes and feels like she actually belongs at Pimsey. Thanks to her innate rowing talent and a hard-won GPA, Rembry she might have a shot at the Ivy League. Her French teacher helps her apply for a junior term abroad scholarship and her new dorm head recruits her into a special culture seminar with an odd and gifted freshman named Sophie Sablon. Rembry is riding so high she doesn’t notice she is drifting away from quiet, science-loving Kes. When Rembry returns from France she is blind-sided by a sexual assault that turns her disillusioned and angry. Faltering but not destroyed, she decides to exact revenge via a swashbuckling “mulligan” period that succeeds in restoring her sense of self and sexual agency, but also lands her in a School Judicial where she is forced to choose between a snitch-bought pardon and loyalty to the swoony hunk who was ten times sweeter than she hoped.
The arc of the novel emphasizes coming-of-age, not trauma, and foregrounds Rembry’s transformation from meek prep supplicant to carpe-hunkum scholar-virago. For comps The Maidenhood Mulligan could be categorized as a mixture of the questing humor in Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep and the fraught art-mentorship issues in Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise.
I wrote the 90,000-word manuscript in Lynn Steger Strong’s 2023-2024 Novel Generator workshop. Jayne Anne Phillips awarded my story “Motu Tapu” the 2015 Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction. My stories have also appeared in Mademoiselle (RIP) and The Crab Orchard Review.
Thank you for your time and consideration. I would be delighted to send you sample pages.
Best regards,
Holloway McCandless
My advice to you is to be more sparing with the humor- especially in the first paragraph we are being given so many images and metaphors that it's hard to discern what the book is actually about! That trend continues throughout the letter-- go for clarity, not cleverness-- and the letter will be stronger. It needs to be shortened, generally, as well. Good luck!
Thank you, Courtney! I was aiming for voice but I can see the overload. Will focus on clarity and turning hyperdetailism into summary on my next attempt....
This is my first time querying, so I'm excited to learn how to make my query letter as compelling as possible. Also, I’m happy to share the actual statistics referenced in the last paragraph during the workshop if my letter is chosen to discuss. Thanks for this opportunity to share my letter!
Dear [Agent],
I’m seeking representation for my debut mystery novel, THE PRICE SHE PAID (87,000 words). The book combines the rich character development of the Inspector Lynley mysteries by Elizabeth George with the fast pacing of the Temperance Brennan thrillers by Kathy Reichs.
Estranged friends Dez and Jessie reconcile their past as they obstruct the investigation into Jessie’s mother’s murder to untangle the secrets hiding her killer.
Riding for the first time since her accident, jockey Desirae Lavalle is hoping to regain her peace of mind. Instead, she finds a severed body part belonging to the murdered mother of her estranged best friend Jessie Harrington. Detectives Fitzgerald Brady and Calla Vos quickly place the victim’s narcissistic husband at the center of their investigation. But Jessie, distrustful the police can understand her dysfunctional family, reunites with Dez to untangle the secrets hidden in her mother’s paintings while the traumatized jockey battles her relapsing OCD. As the case becomes national news and the detectives reckon with the sacrifices their jobs require, all efforts converge on a book club book that might hold the keys to the killer’s identity. But no one is prepared for the shocking truth and what it means about the psychological forces driving us all. Told from multiple points of view in the thirty-six hours after the body is discovered, THE PRICE SHE PAID is a fast-paced story about the true price of secrets we keep from ourselves.
I’m a therapist with both personal and professional expertise in the intersection of trauma and OCD, the co-author of an OCD self-help book (published by New Harbinger; X+ copies sold), and author of Is Fred in the Refrigerator? Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life (my self-published memoir; X+ copies sold). My outreach includes blogging for Psychology Today (posts viewed X times/year) and my website (X visitors/year), and I’ve been interviewed for coverage about OCD in The Washington Post, VICE, Psych Central, and others. When not writing or seeing clients, I’m pretending I’m on a jockey on my Arabian horse, Dove.
May I send you the manuscript?
Sincerely,
Shala
Dear [Agent],
A 32-year relationship is tested by a steamy same-sex attraction, an open marriage, and an involuntary mental health stay in Hurricane Lessons, my 58,000-word memoir of a Midwestern mid-life reckoning and realignment, structured in three parts: The Calm Before the Storm, The Eyewall, and The Aftermath. Because the primary theme of Hurricane Lessons is the vitriolic breakdown of a 25-year marriage after a late-in-life coming out, my memoir will appeal to readers of Suzette Mullen’s The Only Way Out is Through, Molly Roden Winter’s More, Gina Frangello’s Blow Your House Down, and Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful.
For the first four decades of my life, I wasn’t brave enough to fully and unapologetically love a woman in a world that had successfully taught me how to be a straight, married, suburban mom of four. Everything shifted when Colleene, my Pilates instructor, pressed her elegant hands into my spine and set my life on fire. Spontaneous combustion. In that instant, I knew I had to choose between the life I had painstakingly built and the life I was meant to live. My then-husband, Chris, and I tried to salvage our marriage by opening it up to other lovers, but when he screamed at me that I was a reverse-Oedipal lesbian cunt—words he had carefully crafted and rehearsed—and later had me committed against my will, I knew I had to liberate myself from the what was so I could finally live who I was.
As the self-appointed President of the St. Michael’s second grade Ranger Rick Club, I always knew I was destined for something big. I wrote my first book—The Story of My Life. A True Story.— at age eight on orange construction paper that was hole-punched and tied with ribbon, which my mother lovingly preserved. The back jacket cover promised the book “Could change your life, just as it changed Katrina’s because she put it down on paper and let her feelings show.” It was a few decades later, however, before my award-winning novel, Parting Gifts was published (She Writes Press, April 2016.) My personal essays have been read by over 1M readers on Huffington Post (I Was a Happily Married Mother of Four. Then I Met a Woman at Pilates.), YourTango.com, and the Manifest-Station and featured in numerous anthologies, including Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis: Women Writers Respond to the Call. In 2016, I was recognized as one of six distinguished authors at the Indianapolis Book & Author luncheon—joining the ranks of past recipients, Elizabeth Berg, Maria de los Santos, Anna Quindlen, Anita Shreve, and Taylor Jenkins Reid—and I was named a BlogHer 2015: Experts Among Us “Voice of the Year.” I am still eagerly awaiting someone to option the movie rights to The Story of My Life. A True Story. (1979).
The first [xx] pages of my memoir are included, and I am happy to provide a complete manuscript at your request. Many thanks for your time and consideration.
This sounds so so good but there is far too much going on. You're going to need to streamline and focus on the most essential thing this book is about and communicate that in your letter. One thing that is helpful is if you stand up and read the query letter out loud (or better yet out loud in front of people)-- your gut (or your friends) can help you understand where the letter needs reigning in.
Dear Jessica,
I see that you are on the lookout for narratives that examine complicated relationships with empathy and humor and I’m hoping that you might be intrigued by my 89,000-word upmarket novel, RESCUING ANNIE.
After ending a thirty-year marriage to a man with a chronic case of failure to launch, Annie, at fifty-five, is on the verge of getting everything she’s ever wanted: a deal to publish her debut novel and life lived on her own terms. But trouble has a way of following Annie around. With her widowed mother in the grip of dementia, and siblings who can’t or won’t help, Annie must come to the rescue. With the crisis de jour, Annie has no sooner settled her mother in her Florida condo when her twentysomething daughter calls from Paris, distraught over the sudden death of her best friend. Annie sees no choice but to fly to Paris.
Trying to juggle it all—her increasingly disoriented mother, a bereaved daughter she can’t seem to comfort and a publishing dream vanishing with every missed deadline—Paris becomes an irresistible diversion, especially when a romance begins to bloom with a handsome French artist who reminds her that part of herself is still very much alive. When her daughter goes into hiding, and her alarmed ex takes the next flight out to Paris with an ulterior motive—he wants Annie back—complications reach a crescendo. There simply isn’t enough of her to go around. As her mother slips further away, Annie has to confront what it really means to choose herself after a lifetime as the good daughter, the good wife and the good mother—learning that freedom was hers for the taking all along.
RESCUING ANNIE will appeal to fans of the complex relationship dynamics and mid-life reinvention in MONOGAMY (Sue Miller) and LEAVING (Roxane Robinson) and the nuanced portrayal of dementia in SIGNAL FIRES (Dani Shapiro).
I write a twice-weekly Substack newsletter, Living in 3D: Divorce, Dementia and Destiny, for an engaged readership. A freelance writer, editor and journalist for Reuters and a ghostwriter of business books for Palgrave MacMillan, I lived in Sweden and Malta for two decades. My middle-grade novel, MORMOR’S PIANO, won first prize in the unpublished middle-grade fiction category from the Florida Writer’s Association (FWA) in 2016. My short stories have been published in FWA’s annual anthologies. My full bio can be found at amybrownauthor.com.
Thank you for your consideration,
Amy
This sounds great! I wonder if another possible comp is DEAR EDNA SLOANE by Amy Shearn...
This sounds so good! I would definitely read this. And I'm adding your comps to my list to read. Lots of luck to you!
Thank you. I am sure you will love these books. I feel a bit daunted choosing these terrific, seasoned and accomplished authors I so admire as comps--but that is the subject matter and sensibility I aim for in my own writing.
They sound like great comps for you. Can't wait to check them out and ultimately read your book one day!
Dear [Agent],
How do you ask for permission from the dead? I struggled with this question in my mid-20s, following my mother’s death from cancer.
My quest for approval started when I was a senior in college in the late 90s. Then, I told my mother about a relationship I’d had with a woman. I wasn’t sure I was a lesbian. Bi, maybe? I knew this wasn’t in her Plan for me (Capital “P.” A two-time cancer survivor, psych ward administrator and inveterate meddler, my mother had Plans). In her mind, I would meet a nice Jewish (male) doctor and snag a wedding announcement in The New York Times, where same-sex couples need not apply at the time. Still, I wanted her to say I was okay just the way I was.
She didn’t. “Your life will be so much harder if you end up with a woman,” she said then. Those turned out to be her only words on the subject. Cancer took her a few years later, just as I was finishing law school in New York City and trying to ignore my persistent attraction to women. In my memoir, COMING IN (90,000 words), I reimagine the coming out story with a search for the approval my mother never gave me.
Despite my mother’s warning, after her death, I found that life was hard no matter whom I dated. I left a sexually unfulfilling relationship with a sweet guy for a married couple, who encouraged me to chase my desire but ultimately couldn’t give me what I wanted. I discovered another kind of love with the sweet guy—then an ex—after he was diagnosed with a terminal illness. A butch woman finally showed me that I could be my full self in a monogamous relationship, before breaking up with me. With the help and heartache of these relationships, as well as encounters with a medium and an actor from my favorite musical as a teen, Les Misérables, I eventually learned the lesson my mother never taught me: Only I could give myself permission to be me.
An honest examination of grief, desire, sex, identity and intimacy, Coming In is a journey about finding oneself, apart from parental and societal expectations. My memoir chronicles the long journey to coming out and its effect on our relationships with our mothers in a similar way to Saeed Jones’s HOW WE FIGHT FOR OUR LIVES. It shares Nicole Chung’s clear prose and focus on parental loss in A LIVING REMEDY. It will also appeal to readers of Laurel Braitman’s WHAT LOOKS LIKE BRAVERY, as it explores the effects of growing up in a family with illness while also sharing Braitman’s propulsive pacing.
I’m a writer on the communications team at one of the largest law firms in the country. Prior to that, I practiced corporate law for many years. In addition to a JD, I hold an MFA in creative writing from Louisiana State University, where I won an award for best screenplay. In the years since my MFA, I’ve studied creative nonfiction with Megan Stielstra and Meghan Daum, as well as Sari Botton. My personal essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Huffington Post, Longreads and It’s Not Us, and have been featured twice in Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web.
Thank you for considering my story.
Alyson Pomerantz
I agree with Sarah-- this sounds like an astonishing book, but you'll need to really shorten things up for the letter otherwise agents will worry that your manuscript is also overlong. Best of luck out there in query land!
What a journey you've been through. I'm so sorry you lost your mum. Your memoir sounds like an enthralling and harrowing read.
I had a writing tutor who had a friend at Penguin South Africa and she told me they appreciate brevity above all things (regarding queries from authors). Dear Lord, isn't it a struggle to condense a fictional character arc, let alone your own life, into 1-3 crisp paragraphs?! Despite the hacking and sawing job you've done, I wonder if you could be even more brutal in trimming this down. Consider challenging yourself to punch the recipient in the gut with your one biggest struggle, and nothing else. It forever surprises me how little detail and context readers really need to understand that teeny, tiny, brilliant spark of what one is really trying to say. A quest for approval as a young lesbian woman in the 90s? How can this woman ever feel accepted by her parents now her mother's passed away? Kapow.
In any case, GOOD LUCK! I'm sure you are not the only one who has been through something like this, and it will certainly help others when it gets out there.
Love this feedback, Sarah! I really appreciate it and agree. It's so hard to get outside your own story and boil it down to its essence but I will keep working on it!
Dear Agent,
I hope you will consider representing my debut novel RACHEL AND THE ANCESTORS (72,000 words). Set in London and Cornwall in 1932–1933, it is the story of Rachel Buxton, an ambitious 24-year-old writer who is unwittingly advancing fascist interests even as she works to help German Jewish cousins get out of Berlin. It’s a novel that will appeal to fans of Kate Atkinson’s Transcription and Francine Prose’s The Vixen. I’m writing to you because of your interest in representing historical fiction with unfamiliar stories--while there are many novels about courageous young women set in World War II, there are few about the rise of fascism in the early 1930s, a time that I'm afraid bears an eerie similarity to our own era.
Rachel complies with the landowner’s insistence that she emphasize the connections between his estate and the legend of Tristan and Isolde, though she doubts that Tristan ever existed. Yet the deeper Rachel digs into the family’s history, the more she realizes how very flawed and ordinary they are and the more difficult she finds it to claim any sort of noble heritage for them. And the clock is ticking on cousin Ilka’s efforts to get her family out of Berlin, a project Rachel thinks is hopeless.
But after Rachel meets Alfred Smethwick (inspired by Oswald Mosley) the powerful and charismatic MP and leader of Britain's growing fascist party and learns that he plans to use her work to flatter Adolf Hitler, a fan of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, she wants to abandon the project. But Ilka argues that Smethwick is likely the only man in Britain who can get her family out of Berlin. Rachel has no choice but to get closer to Smethwick.
I am a Boston-area writer and theater reviewer. I have visited Cornwall a number of times to research my novel, and I write regularly for Current Biography, Literary Ladies Guide, and Stage and Cinema, and my work has appeared inBlack Warrior Review, Ploughshares, and Christian Science Monitor. My MFA is from UMass Amherst, and I have received residencies from Yaddo and the Millay Colony.
I’ve pasted in a synopsis and bio and attached the first 50 pages.
Sincerely,
Lynne Weiss (she/they)
Dear Agent,
I couldn’t stop retracing my steps. I notoriously ruined leisure activities by mentally cataloging my elementary school teachers, tracking Disneyland rides, chronicling every guy I’d ever slept with. It was like a neurotic game of connect-the-dots that never ended. Since childhood, I had been leaving myself breadcrumb trails, and by the time I hit midlife, it was so natural to me that I almost didn’t question it. Until I did.
Breadcrumbs Across Suburbia: How I Retraced My Steps And Found My Way Home is an 87,000-word memoir that encapsulates a nostalgia pilgrimage across four midwestern states, two years of IFS therapy, a midlife ADHD diagnosis, and the end of a 14-year marriage. It is Group meets Untamed meets This American Ex-Wife.
In 2014, as a self-proclaimed nostalgia junkie, I had the hare-brained idea to take my two- and seven-year-old daughters, sans husband, on a 25-hour road trip to say goodbye to my childhood home. Well, one of them. As I lay on a massage table shortly before the trip, sabotaging yet another perfectly relaxing body care treatment, I tallied 18 homes over 45 years. And after I bid farewell to my parents’ house, I couldn’t shake the idea that I wanted to go back and visit every single one of them, from Iowa to Milwaukee to Denver.
I felt certain that returning to every old house would uncover some great mystery that explained why exactly I was so, well, weird, despite my boring Midwest Lutheran Scandinavian upbringing. Once I had the idea, I promptly did nothing about it for nearly a decade, until it became the Ghost of Christmas Past tearing open my bed canopy and I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
In 2022, after a year of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy and identifying the different “parts” that made up my system—The Good Girl, The Backyard Bitch, The Fire Goddess, The Lazy Daydreamer, Little Liar, The Inner Critic, the Confident Queen, to name a few—I realized I had been looking for answers in the wrong places. I needed to follow my inner trailheads, not my outer ones. When I finally took my nostalgia pilgrimage to visit all 17 former homes, I did so through the lens of IFS, and at long last discovered what I was looking for. As I followed my trails of breadcrumbs, I wrote myself out of one life and into another. I left a career I had outgrown. I filed for divorce. I got the ADHD diagnosis that shed light on four decades of step-retracing and discomfort in my own skin.
IFS therapy is having a moment in pop culture. Celebrities like Dr. Becky of Good Inside, Glennon Doyle, host of We Can Do Hard Things and author of Untamed, and even Alanis Morrisette, have integrated “parts work” into the cultural lexicon. As Gen X women hit midlife, the therapy generation continues to make this kind of work more mainstream. My book adds to the discourse by exploring the value of IFS in untangling previously unexplored issues in midlife.
I am co-host of the Mother Plus Podcast, a show for moms with ADHD, Executive Producer of Listen To Your Mother, co-editor of Midstory Magazine on Substack, and a freelance writer and stand up comic. My work has been published in O Magazine, The Washington Post, Brain, Child Magazine, Cosmopolitan.com, The Huffington Post, The Belladonna Comedy, Mutha Magazine, The Chicken Soup for the Soul series, and other places.
Thank you for your consideration.
Best,
Stephanie Sprenger
Thank you so much for sharing! There are a lot of moving pieces in this query which could lead agents to not respond because they could think that your book is overly complicated or "not about one thing." You'll want to streamline to come up with what sounds like a "sticky" premise. Best of luck with this!
I really appreciate you taking the time to comment--thank you! Doing your online Proposal course right now and loving it. Thank you!
Oh Steph I'm so so glad!
Thanks so much for this opportunity! I'm excited for the class!
Dear Agent,
(Personalize here)
My son couldn’t see me from the other side of the mattress I was attempting to push up the stairs, but he knew his mother was struggling. I hated that. My lack of strength wasn’t supposed to force him, at nine years old, to be strong. He shouldn’t have to listen to his mother crying behind a mattress, especially on the day he and his little sister moved into an apartment half the size of the only house they remembered living in, as they anticipated starting a different school and everything else my decisions caused to change in their lives. And as I hid behind that mattress, the fear set in that maybe the aftermath of the divorce I chose in order to find happiness would be worse on my children than if I stayed in my unhappy marriage.
CAMOUFLAGE: A Memoir of Divorce, Hope and Self-Discovery (69,000 words) is the story of how I emerged from the shadow of my husband’s military career and found my way back to myself as a single mother approaching middle age. And as I set out on a quest to figure out who I was as a woman without this man, I discovered my life as a military spouse actually prepared me for not being one.
CAMOUFLAGE is a story of letting go and moving on, self-discovery and second chances. My story speaks to readers facing divorce, women searching for lost identities, single parents and military spouses. It would sit on a bookshelf with Lyz Lenz’s THIS AMERICAN EX-WIFE, Leslie Jamison’s SPLINTERS and Kelly McMasters’ THE LEAVING SEASON.
Divorce is having a cultural moment in which women are leaving their marriages to pursue happiness. In fact, more than two-thirds of all divorces are filed by women. As Lyz Lenz writes in her best-selling memoir, divorce “requires learning to reimagine happiness beyond what everyone told you it should look like.” As this trend continues, my book fits perfectly into the conversation, while also sharing a unique sneak peek into the life of a Navy officer’s wife.
Similar to my recent reported essay for The TODAY Show, I’ll weave reporting into my existing manuscript. I plan to reach out to family and marriage experts and psychologists to interlace my own story within the cultural moment.
I’ve been a writer and content editor at Military.com for eleven years. My essays about military life and divorce appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, HuffPost, The TODAY Show and YourTango, among others, and I have other work in Business Insider, Grown and Flown, Healthline, The Girlfriend from AARP and more. My HuffPost reel talking about my divorce essay currently has 90K views on Instagram and 13.3K views on TikTok.
I have both a proposal and a full manuscript available upon request. Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Heather Sweeney
https://www.heatherlsweeney.com/
I see we write on the same topic, Heather, although yours in memoir and mine in fiction. I would love to read your book. I've read all the comps you mentioned. Good luck!
Thanks so much, Amy! I've actually sometimes thought about writing my memoir as fiction, but I'm sticking with this memoir and then hopefully writing a novel with content I couldn't include in the memoir. Good luck to you too!
This sounds great and the "MilWife" is well deserving of her place in the cultural spotlight! Do you know the short story collection by Siobhan Fallon? It's a fictional version of the women living in their husband's military careers....
Thank you so much! The mil spouse life is so unique with many untold stories, especially those of divorce. And yes, I've known Siobhan from afar (we're Facebook friends) for probably a decade now! In fact, her book was one of the first mil spouse books I ever read. So good.
We can have a little Siobhan fan club right here! We lived in Abu Dhabi at the same time & got to know each other - she's in Cyprus now, still making MilWifeLife work. Your project sounds so well-timed; I'm sure it's going to be snapped up!
I love that...a Siobhan fan club! How cool you had a chance to get to know her. And thank you so much for saying that about my memoir. Fingers crossed!
Dear Agent:
Submitted is 77,000-word novel titled ”The Upfall.” It is about a young man’s journey from child abuse to alcoholism and murder and back. He struggles as a teenager and young adult with sobriety while trying to make amends for the death he caused. It is a story of struggle and redemption.
My bio follows:
Geraghty is a writer and a maritime lawyer. He has published in The Pittsburgh Journal of Law and Commerce a scholarly article regarding a defense to a seafarer’s personal injury suit, along with several legal cases.
He has been writing all his life and majored in English at Boston College. Afterwards, he was also Honorable Mention in the Writer’s Digest annual Short Story Contest.
Some of his favorite authors include Jo Nesbo, Henning Mankel, Donna Tartt, John Kennedy Toole and Douglas Adams.
When he is not writing he enjoys skiing, running, cycling and other activities with his children.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Patrick Geraghty
Thank you so much for sharing, Patrick. For the query, you'll want to keep the letter in the first person, including your bio. Best of luck with this!